Addressing Pain Points Means More Than Broad Smarty Pants Slogans

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

One of my favorite modern Christmas movies is Elf, with Will Farrell. The movie is good no matter the season you may currently be in. If you are not aware, it is the story of a man who grew up at the North Pole raised by elves, his name is Buddy the Elf. One day he is told that he is not a real elf and he goes to New York City and search of his real father and to discover himself – hilarity ensues.

During one scene in the movie Buddy passes a neon sign at a coffee shop that says “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”. To you and me we know that probably isn’t true but to a naive elf like Buddy, why would we say it if it wasn’t true? The video is below just in case you need more of a visual.

Stop filling your website with gobbledegook

Think about it for business. Have you read some of the content on the average B2B website? They are full of nonsensical padded sentences with terms and rhetoric no one actually uses when they talk. Product descriptions are airy and usually not very helpful. Every solution is ‘best of breed’, ‘world class’, ‘the best’, ‘best selling’ and other gobbledegook terms.

People come to your website because they are looking for more information. Then let’s give them what they are looking for. Tell your website visitors in plain English what they need to know about your products and services.

If you think about how the average new visitor gets to a website it is usually a referral from someplace else or it was listed in s search query they entered. Think about the keywords and problems your target audience is searching for and create content to rank for those terms. By writing content and copy that addresses potential users pain points, you are showing them how you are the right solution.

So when writing copy for your website or your next blog entry, lets spend less effort trying to sounds like a smarty pants and more effort on helping people with answers to the questions that they are looking for!